Hope and Grief in an Age of Climate Change
Julai Watts Belser
Credit: Shutterstock
Julia Watts Belser is a professor at Georgetown University, as well as a rabbi and a longtime activist for gender, disability, and climate justice. Her most recent book, Loving Our Own Bones: Disability Wisdom and the Spiritual Subversiveness of Knowing Ourselves Whole (2023), won a National Jewish Book Award.
Climate grief lies heavy on my heart. As I write these words, wildfires rage in Southern California. I message with friends whose homes have burned to the ground, whose childhood photos are ash. The air is acrid with the smoke of synagogues and shops and favorite eateries and jacaranda trees.
As I write these words, our country prepares to inaugurate a president who plans to roll back federal climate policy and undo environmental protections, who will withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreements that orchestrate global climate commitments.
As I write these words, bombs still shatter Gaza; the hostages are still not home. There are a thousand reasons to push for peace, and ecocide is one. When we count the cost of war, we must learn to reckon not just with the visceral fact of immediate death, but also with militarism as long-term poison, the slow violence of chemical harm that leeches into soil and groundwater, the cancers that bloom in war’s toxic aftermath.
For these things I weep. And for more.
Reading Jonah while the World Burns
Jewish communities often read the biblical book of Jonah as a story of repentance. Sent by God to the cruel city of Nineveh, the prophet buys passage on a ship going in the opposite direction. Yet he can’t escape the divine call. Swallowed by a whale, spit back onto dry land, and sent to prophesy again, Jonah ultimately brings about the Bible’s most dramatic redemption story. The people of Nineveh take his rebuke to heart. They change their ways and avert destruction. They repent, and the city is spared.
There’s a tidy moral tale here about the possibility of transformation even in the thick of crisis. But I will not tell it. In a world wracked by war and extinctions of all kinds, where the atmospheric carbon mounts and the oil burns inexorably, it feels like blasphemy to speak so cheaply of hope and change.
These days, I find myself turning instead to a very different Jonah: the haunted prophet of Rabbi Jill Hammer’s eponymous poem. I’ve often imagined Jonah as a man who feels unequal to the task of prophecy, a man who flees God’s command because the stakes are high and he’s afraid to fail. But Hammer opens a different window on the prophet’s heart. Her Jonah is weary and bitter and angry at the world. Her poem opens with a haunting line: “I didn’t ask to be born in a cruel time.”
In Hammer’s telling, Jonah looks unflinchingly at the brutality of the world. “If some city somewhere is sinning,” her prophet says, “it’s the same as any other city in the world.” A few lines later, Jonah wonders aloud: “If I provoke my maker, how much worse can I be than my next-door neighbor? If I flee my destiny, why would God bother to rise from the era’s vast lassitude to hunt me down?”
“The cosmos stinks,” Hammer’s Jonah concludes. “My soul fogs in the stench of it. The whole place might as well be the belly of a whale.”
Soul fog. Those words give name to the feeling that stalks me some nights: not only dread, but also resignation. The suffocating sense that none of it matters, that nothing’s worth doing, that it’s all already lost. This is the vise I most want to loosen, the feeling I want to untangle when it gets its fingers wrapped tight around my heart. When I name it soul fog, I don’t write from some tidy, unaffected place. I write to hone my own tools for navigating the shoals, the undertow.
Now let me be clear: I’m no fan of fighting against feeling. I believe that your grief and mine are held gently by God, alongside our hopelessness, our anger, our malaise. I don’t want to moralize our emotional lives, to champion some feelings as signals of virtue while we shove others into the closet like dirty laundry. Feminist critic Sara Ahmed writes incisively in the Promise of Happiness (2010) about the way the prevailing cultural demand to cultivate good feelings—and to repress undesirable ones—can blunt our capacity to navigate oppressive systems. We live in a world where the power of positive thinking is often lifted up as cultural obligation, where it’s easy to feel like we owe each other unwavering good cheer. Hope can be a cruel demand. And the expectation that we all feel fine while the sweet world burns? To that, I say no.
I find myself drawn instead to the reorientation Mimi Khúc offers in dear elia: letters from the Asian American abyss (2024), her decision to turn toward the questions, “What hurts? And how do we go on living while it hurts?” I find myself asking how we might buoy each other in those moments when the work feels fruitless, when we offer ourselves to a fight that matters, when we bare our hearts and lose. I’m thinking about persistence as a spiritual practice. I’m thinking about hope. But I’m also holding close the wisdom I’ve learned from Black, queer, trans, disabled, and other minoritized communities, the way activists and artists have taught me to hold hope differently. Not hope as pablum. Not hope as panacea. Hope like the ornery unwillingness to give up and go home. Hope like the hardscrabble press of a dandelion, pushing her head up through cracks in the concrete; about the stubborn tenacity of the life we call weeds; about the fierceness it takes to bloom.
Soul Fog and the Story of Sodom
But the trouble in my heart is not simply grief. Soul fog tangles with the terrain of complicity, with inescapability. The intricate fabric of my ordinary days is stitched through and through to the vast engine of climate change. For sure, I’ve made choices that aim to divest. I strive to live green, to shop local and small, to fuel my own home using the sun. But when I look hard at the bones of my life? I see how we’re caught in a net we can’t seem to slip, how the banks and the boards drive us all to the brink, how the motors are built to keep chugging and chugging.
Let me tell you a story, another ancient Jewish story that resonates in this moment. It’s a story drawn from the Babylonian Talmud, a rabbinic recounting of the city of Sodom, the infamous biblical city destroyed by God after its men do violence against Abraham and his daughters in Genesis 19. Whenever I tell this story, I start by laying something plain: In our contemporary moment, the sin of Sodom is sometimes understood as a condemnation of queer lives. But that’s a strange reading of this tale. The men of Sodom threaten to rape Abraham, an abhorrent act by any measure. But to read this story as a censure of gay sex is, as Rabbi Jay Michaelson has observed, “like reading the story of an ax murderer as being about an ax” (God vs. Gay? A Religious Case for Equality, 2010).
Ancient Christian and Jewish writers understood Sodom’s sin in light of a powerful passage in Ezekiel 16:49: “This was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy.” For the Church Fathers and the rabbis alike, Sodom is a tale that condemns violence against the vulnerable. They told the story to speak out against hatred for the stranger. The sin of Sodom is not about sex, but about inhospitality, brutality, and greed.
The Babylonian Talmud lays out an extensive account of crime and cruelty in the city, detailing the wickedness of its inhabitants at length. It also asks: what turned a whole city rotten to the core? In the Talmud’s telling, Sodom was a land of great luxury. The rabbis liken the city to an unnamed land described in the book of Job: a land where the earth itself gives forth bread, a land whose very stones are sapphires, a land without predators, a land whose dust is gold (Job 28:5-8). But the very bounty of the land becomes the people’s undoing. When the rabbis tell the Sodom story, they tell it as a chilling account of how good fortune can get under our skin, how abundance can turn us insular and cruel. In Bavli Sanhedrin 109a, the rabbis teach:
The men of Sodom became haughty
from all the good fortune that had been given them.
The men of Sodom said:
Since our land gives forth bread and its dust is gold,
why do we need travelers?
They do not come among us except to diminish us!
The people of Sodom claim for themselves the goodness and bounty of the land where they live. They guard it jealously. They deny it to anyone else. And they act brutally to ensure the wealth stays only in their hands.
Sodom is an imagined landscape, a world quite far from our own. But I tell this story here and now because I think it might help us look more closely at something hard and true about the violence in our own midst, about the moral geography of climate change. To grapple forthrightly with climate ethics, I contend we must come face to face with the profound disparity of climate impacts. We live in a world where harm is distributed unequally. Some of us live farther from the trouble, while others face the storm head-on.
This recognition of unequal harm is a signature insight of environmental justice organizing by Black, indigenous, and other activists of color who have worked for decades to recognize, document, and resist disproportionate harm: the landfills and incinerators sited in certain neighborhoods, the toxic waste seeping into the ground beneath public housing complexes, the slow poisons of industrial runoff and corroding lead pipes. Some people profit, while others pay in pain. When it comes to climate justice, the stakes are just as stark. Jewish ethicist Laurie Zoloth names this the core ethical issue of climate change: Wealthy industrialized countries and the world’s more privileged citizens are vastly more responsible for environmental damage and climate violence, but it’s people living in poverty who suffer first and most acutely from environmental harm (Ethics for the Coming Storm: Climate Change and Jewish Thought, 2023).
Let me say it plain: It’s no moral failing to live in a place that’s buffered from risk. Safety from poison and pollution and the rising tide is something that all of us deserve. But the unequal distribution of harm raises a crucial ethical question: Will those of us who live in more sheltered places pay attention to other people’s suffering? Will we find ways to share the wealth? Or will we double down on protecting what we think is ours?
Violence and Complicity in the Cruel City
Many of us who live in more protected places tend to think about climate change as a future apocalypse. But climate change is already in our midst: in more intense and unpredictable hurricanes, in heat waves and wildfires, in drought and water rationing, in food shortages and supply-line breakdowns. None of these things are caused unequivocally by climate change. But climate change makes them worse. It makes our systems more unstable, our food more expensive. It makes shelter and safety harder to find.
Let me tell you another story of Sodom. In Bavli Sanhedrin 109b, the rabbis say that when a poor traveler first came to the city, each and every man of Sodom would give him a dinar. On the surface, it seems like a generous gift. But each man in Sodom would write his own name on the coin. Why? Because the city’s men had a pact. They would give the stranger money, but they would not sell him bread. And when he died of hunger, each and every one would reclaim his own coin.
It’s easy to inveigh against the cruelty of imagined ancient men. But the city of Sodom is where many of us live. In Washington, DC, the place I call home, one in three people reported food insecurity in 2024. Hunger is commonplace, fueled by rising rents and soaring prices and a safety net that’s barely holding on.
When the rabbis tell the story of Sodom, they tell a story about systemic social violence. They tell a story about the way the residents of one rich city collude to keep themselves safe, while other people starve. What’s most striking to me isn’t the cruelty itself, but the way the racket runs. The plan requires each person’s compliance: No one can break the pact. No one can sell bread to the stranger. The scheme only works if everyone’s in.
Climate catastrophe runs on systems like these. And like the people of Sodom, all of us get conscripted into an arrangement we didn’t design. If you grow up in this city? You inherit the deal. It’s the way the world works, the way things have always been. And besides, if any of us stop, then none of us collect our coin.
But unlike the Sodom story, where we can imagine how a single person might act to break the cruel pact, climate change doesn’t offer individuals many meaningful ways to throw a wrench into the system. The forces that drive and exacerbate climate change are so deeply intertwined with the basic architecture of our everyday lives that it’s hard to know where and how to intervene. That’s part of why we face such terrible soul fog. We see the violence that drives this cruel city. We see the wounding of the world, and we want to do better. But we’re caught in the net, and we don’t know how to get free.
Breaking the Wicked Pact
The Talmud tells story after story of Sodom’s cruelty: tales of corrupt judges and unjust courts, of victims punished, travelers tortured, and orphans betrayed. It also attests to the culture of fear that reigned among Sodom’s citizens, the way the men of the city were at risk if they relented, if they indulged even the smallest impulse toward kindness. The rabbis tell how Eliezer, Abraham’s servant, once came to the city and happened upon a feast. Now we know already that the rule in this city was that no one offers a traveler bread. To invite a stranger to a sumptuous meal? It is a capital crime. When Eliezer sits down at the table, the man beside him says, “Who invited you here?” And Eliezer says, “You!” It’s a lie, of course. But the man is so terrified, he flees the scene. Our clever hero works his way up the table, driving the rich men away from their banquet until he sits alone and feasts.
On its face, the Talmud’s tale is meant to mock these haughty men who are too frightened and foolish to see through Eliezer’s ruse. But when I hear this story, I find myself listening beyond the easy laugh. I find myself thinking about the way violence and fear prop up cruel regimes, the way the powers-that-be are quick to punish noncompliance, the way they use threat to keep us all in line.
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Consider the last tale the Talmud tells about Sodom: A young woman worried about a certain poor man. We don’t know how they met, we don’t know why she came to care. All we know is what the rabbis say: She used to hide bread in her pitcher and sneak it out to him. She kept him alive, crust by crust. Day by day.
It is a courageous choice, a dangerous one. The men of Sodom take notice. “What is going on?” they ask. “Why is this poor man still alive?” They know the stranger has outlived his time. He should be dead, the coins they gave him already reclaimed. So, they resolve to root out the source of his support. They find the woman, and they kill her. The Talmud says the city elders take the woman and stand her on the rampart of the city wall. They smear honey over her body, and hornets come and eat her alive (bSanhedrin 109b).
To tell this story is to confront a hard truth about our world. It is to name the way violent systems lash out to protect themselves, the way the powerful respond when resistance threatens their preserve. There’s a part of me that wants to blot this story from the book, to tell instead a different tale: one that ends with kindness rewarded, with moral agency affirmed.
But I also hold the hardness of this story close. I tell it to gird myself for trouble, to firm my own resolve. It is a difficult task before us: to teach ourselves to recognize systemic violence, to perceive suffering that has been veiled from us, to imagine alternatives, to break the codes of conduct that keep the cruel city running. It is work that matters. It is work that will cost.
Critiquing Cataclysm and Climate Doom
Rabbinic tradition sides unequivocally with the executed woman. In the Talmud’s telling, her voice ascends to the heavens. God hears her cry and responds by destroying the city. When the rabbis tell this story, they mean to make plain a powerful conviction: that God hears the cries of the oppressed, that evil will be overturned, that injustice cannot endure forever. Cruelty does not have the final word.
But I want a different ending for this story—not just for the mythical wicked city, but for all of us. I want us to say no to theologies that imagine God as the force who directs disaster, who destroys cities in response to wrongdoing. That’s a dangerous paradigm, one that we see repeated in a certain strand of religious discourse that treats contemporary disasters as punishment for moral crime. In 2005, after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, prominent conservative voices declared the catastrophe God’s way of sweeping away the wicked city’s sin. That kind of rhetoric blames victims and scars survivors, while privileging the more protected as the faithful keepers of God’s command.
I don’t believe God orchestrates catastrophe. When disaster strikes? I think of God as the one who strengthens the hands of the rescuers, who holds us when we mourn. But it’s not just the image of God I want to reimagine. It’s also the way we think about cataclysm. In their book, Noah’s Arkive (2023), Jeffrey J. Cohen and Julian Yates draw attention to the way that our cultural penchant for retelling stories about the biblical flood shapes the scripts we use to envision climate catastrophe. The tiny little ark with its handful of chosen survivors is a dangerous cultural template: one that inscribes the inevitability of deluge and disaster, one that suggests the only route to safety is to seek refuge for a few, while the rest of the world drowns.
Doom is a powerful cultural force in our public conversations about climate change, and while it might power us toward a bracing recognition of the stakes—it can also lead to apathy and fatalism. Jonah walks into the city with one message for the people: “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown” (3:4). No explanations. No encouragement to course-correct. Just boom, doom, despair. Of course, the biblical tale takes an unexpected turn. The people of Nineveh hear Jonah’s prophecy and immediately repent. But that’s not how the story usually unfolds. As cultural critic Rebecca Solnit observes, doom saps our resolve. If enough of us think the game is already up, there’s no reason to strategize, no reason to fight. “Proclaiming defeat contributes to it,” Solnit reminds us. “It’s like bringing poison to the potluck.… It’s a form of sabotage” (“Why Climate Despair is a Luxury,” 2023).
The power to make tangible shifts in our climate future doesn’t rest only in the hands of our legislators. A 2021 study by the Indigenous Environmental Network and Oil Change International showed that indigenous-led environmental efforts in North America over the past decade stopped or delayed the equivalent of a quarter of US and Canadian greenhouse gas emissions. A recent series of landmark victories have granted legal personhood to imperiled rivers, forests, mountains, and endangered species, opening potent avenues for the protection of nonhuman life in Ecuador, New Zealand, Brazil, and beyond. Closer to home? In 2024, the Union for Reform Judaism committed to divest from fossil fuels with the support of Dayenu: A Jewish Call to Climate Action, on whose advisory board I serve. Taking tangible action for the common good is the most potent antidote I know to despair.
The Politics of Hope, The Practice of Courage
When I speak about climate change, people often ask if I have hope. It’s a complicated question, one that requires a fair bit of unpacking. We tend to lionize hope as an essential requirement for action. But I think that’s a misguided notion. Hope isn’t an essential arrow in the quiver of climate response; it’s just one kind of catalyst. Other possibilities abound. In a recent article, “Beyond ‘Hope:’ Constructive Anger as a Force in Sustained Climate Activism,” climate activist and Christian theologian Marion Grau lifts up anger as a potent tool for fueling collective climate action, for sustaining strategic response to the ongoing devastation of earth and life. Environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht calls it terrafurie, the rage some of us feel in the face of extinction (Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World, 2019).
In a gorgeous essay about grief and resolve, climate scientist Kate Marvel writes of confronting the fact that climate damage is part and parcel of the world in which we live; the world we once knew is never coming back. Audiences urge her again and again to tell them a story about hope, to give them some promise that everything will be all right. But what she offers instead is a call to courage. “Courage,” Marvel reminds us, “is the resolve to do well without the assurance of a happy ending” (The On Being Project, 2018).
I still hold hope close. The resolve I call hope anchors my work and sustains my conviction. It’s a powerful fuel for my own drive. But what I mean by hope is a quite particular thing. It isn’t a conviction that we’ll turn back time and return ourselves to Eden, that the woods and the wetlands that flourished in my childhood will someday be restored. The hope I hold doesn’t rest on a reasoned assessment of likely good outcomes. It isn’t pegged to our chances of stopping the storm.
Hope is a practice I keep, not a feeling I wait for. When I say hope, I mean the choice to give bread to people who are hungry, even if the state declares it a crime. I mean the power we generate through political action, the commitments we keep to persistent disruption and daily incremental work. I mean the fierce work of survival in all its forms: the scrag trees that grow up in old, abandoned lots, the crows who have learned to lay claim to our trash and to feast. When I say hope, I mean a hand on your shoulder, a whisper in the night. I mean the hot dish left on a neighbor’s porch, the cash shared, the meal delivery dispatched. I mean the smallest gestures of solidarity and care.
We don’t have to listen hard to hear the siren song of our days: too late, too late, too late. The hope I mean talks back to that sinister voice. It counters despair with a different kind of question: Too late for what? Too late for whom?
There is a lot we can do to mitigate the effects of climate disruption, to hold the worst of the harm at bay. It isn’t too late to shift the scope and scale of the impact. It’s not too late to build more robust systems of support, resilience, and adaptive response. It’s not too late to forge new ways of living in a climate-affected world, to take the paths that Puerto Rican Jewish feminist Aurora Levins Morales calls us toward, to “become apprentice islanders and learn the things that island people know,” to learn to “float on baskets woven from the leftovers of extraction, plastic drums, polyester shirts, styrofoam coolers, nylon ropes, piled high with compost and heavy with green growing corn, tomatoes, melons, morning glories” (“Will We?” In Silt: Prose Poems, 2019).
Solidarity as Soul Work
How can we make climate disruption more survivable? How can we make climate impacts less unjust? These are vital questions before us now. One of the most pernicious elements of extreme weather and other climate impacts is the way they intensify inequality. Neglected infrastructure and strained systems are more likely to fail in the midst of a crisis. People who are already living on the edge are less likely to have the resources to evacuate, to shore up their own homes, or bounce back after a crisis.
My own work focuses on disabled people’s climate response. I direct the Disability and Climate Change Public Archive Project, a digital initiative that chronicles the lived experience and insights of disabled activists and community leaders on the front lines of climate crisis. Climate change heightens ableism, racism, and structural injustice. Disabled people regularly contend with a world that fails us, navigating hostile architecture, meager public services, shoddy public transportation systems, precarious communication access, and bureaucratic tangles for basic life needs. Many disabled people, especially those of us who are multiply marginalized, experience chronic crisis and precarity as an ongoing condition of ordinary life. When a storm strikes, when climate disruption tears through our usual support systems, everyday inequalities turn even more deadly.
But here’s the other thing I want to tell you: Disability is a masterclass in adaptation. And disability communities are at the forefront of climate resilience and crisis response. Many disability organizers and activists are experts in orchestrating grassroots mutual aid: sourcing masks and air filters and emergency generators, sharing resources, knowledge, and life-saving hacks. Now I don’t want to lift up mutual aid as a cure for what ails us. There is something perverse in systems that leave people on fixed incomes to shoulder not only the labor of acute climate response, but also its costs. I want us to live in a world where civic leaders craft emergency response plans in collaboration with minoritized peoples, a world where we orient toward infrastructure, a world where we choose to invest in care. I want a world where systems are built for climate responsiveness, a world that plans for us all to survive. But I also take to heart the words of disabled activist Patty Berne, “We save each other” (Disability and Climate Change Public Archive Project, March 1, 2024).
When I turn back to Jonah with disability wisdom in mind, this is the Torah that I see: The real hero of the Jonah story isn’t the titular prophet, the one who walks in and proclaims that prophecy of doom. It’s the nameless people of Nineveh, the ones who found Jonah on the beach, who tended him, fed him, and brought him fresh water when he’d been dredged from the depths. The biblical text tells us nothing about this particular moment. After Jonah was thrown overboard in that terrible storm, after he was swallowed whole by the whale, all we hear is that God commanded that great creature to spit him up on dry land. Next thing we know? He walks into the city and tells them the end is near.
Jill Hammer’s poem offers us a different telling. Jonah speaks of the day when he first comes to land, how “some Ninevite, a sinner” took a cloth from her basket and covered his body, how some other stranger gave him water to drink. At the end of the day, Jonah sticks to the script and declares the city’s doom. But these days, I ask myself: What if we don’t hold so tightly to Jonah’s conviction? What if we take the Nineveh road?
I want to see the future we forge if we go bold on the soul work it takes to make structural change. I want us to gamble on a different path. But it’s not just the repentance story that draws me. It’s also the fierce, fragile work we do when hard days come, the concrete acts of solidarity, the practice of care. The choice to share water. The choice to share food. No matter the storm, no matter the loss, these are choices that always remain: To be each other’s shelter. To knit our lives together. To help each other through.
